


Remembering Karl

by Vimes



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: From the kink meme, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 11:42:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20563730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vimes/pseuds/Vimes
Summary: Anders finishes his business in the Kirkwall Chantry and thinks back on what he’s lost.





	Remembering Karl

Even at night, light fell in through the tall Chantry windows from the moon, the stars and the city and landed across the statues and pooled on the bare stone of the floor. Even at night, the building felt alive with voices just beyond the cusp of hearing. Anders thought he heard a stifled sob. He had come up through the basement and placed his charges as he went. His heart was in his throat, his head was light with exhaustion, his ears too alert to sort the background noises from the signs of danger. There was one spot left he had to get to, one more supporting pillar.

Keep yourself busy, that was the way. Nothing in this world ever changed without action and once you took it on there was no end to the things that needed fixing.

He took it all on. The grimy tasks. The risks. The awful confidences from people who had no one else to share them with. He listened because who else would? Keep yourself busy, fill up your mind with other people’s pain and there won’t be room left for yours. Fill your days with the big impersonal problems and your own will seem so small by comparison. Push yourself into the small hours and there’s no night left to lay awake, tossing and turning…

What lay beyond this for him? This new world he was creating, was there a place for him in it? Anders had thought about death on the daily for so long, the idea had no tension for him anymore and he thought about it as a consequence with the same detachment as any of the other unfathomable options. If nothing else it’d mean rest, presumably. Heaven, Hell… it was such a long time since he had thought in those terms.

If he survived this, perhaps his role would be the same. Kicked around by turns, scrambling to do what little good he could while he waited for the next blow. Comforts few and far between. Maybe. Maybe others would pick up what he had started and he’d be swept along by something seething and big, something he couldn’t predict.

Anders made it more than halfway up the stairs before he remembered where exactly he was going. He wished he could say it hit him like a punch in the stomach, or that the sight of that little nook, littered with warm candles and leftover furniture, brought him back to that moment in time with clarity and sharpness. The least he could do would be to honestly say he’d keep the memory with him to his grave. But here he stood, and he couldn’t remember the colour of Karl’s robes.

When he tried to recall those last words, he could only force a few of them to ring in his mind with Karl’s own voice… the rest had lost his melody and his cadence, they were out of order, he couldn’t sort them. Anders held on to the railing by his side. His nails bent against the stone and on his other side, his staff supported his weight. He cleared his throat, he tensed his jaw and ran his tongue over his teeth.

How far had the blood spilled? Where had it landed? Had the carpet been replaced, or would he find stains if he got on his knees and looked for them?

He swallowed and he swallowed again. He couldn’t remember… so much of that night was a tangle and the important things, details he had promised himself to preserve forever, lay knotted together somewhere inside that mess. What he did recall… there was no way to tell if it was really real, if it was true to what had happened, because he’d pulled up those moments before his inner eye over and over, by choice or by compulsion, in dreams, and he would never know if all he had left was the memory of remembering the memory. The past was worn out by repetition.

Anders blinked and turned his head away, searching for movements in the dark and saw nothing. It was dangerous to linger here, he knew that. But he couldn’t help how he faltered - he didn’t want to cut this doubt short, not this time. This place… Karl’s ashes were probably tossed into the harbour and he shouldn’t have to make a murder scene a stand in for a grave but it was as close as he would ever come. And he had walked past it and through it too many times before to count, he had been prepared to walk across it now again without a thought.

Wooden boxes full of unlit red candles, as thick as his arm, lay scattered across the main hall of the Chantry with donation tins beside them. For a small tithe, you bought one and lit it to accompany a prayer. Anders had stolen one on his way in both as a matter of course and as a precaution in case he didn’t want to risk a spell. It weighed down his left pocket and he stood a little more balanced once he’d brought it out, carried it across the carpet and set it on the stone altar by the bed. A spark lit it and Anders paused, just in case it’d be mirrored in his chest by some kind of flicker or burn. Alas, it didn’t seem like visual metaphors was what did it for him tonight.

There shouldn’t have to be some swell of emotion for him to know that he had honoured Karl, should there? Other things remained. Those six freckles on the back of Karl’s neck… Anders had always seen a pattern there so he’d dipped a quill in ink one morning and strung them together into the shape of a weirdly smiling duck. Karl had gotten annoyed, or made a decent show of being annoyed, swatted Anders away… and by the trail of ink running from Karl’s collar to Anders’ sleeve, everyone in the tower put two and two together and by the end of the day the rumours about them had turned into a fact. Anders could still trace those freckles by feel, even if there wasn’t anything left to touch. Who else alive could say that?

Every life Anders saved, every mage he snatched from the Templars’ reach and every day he picked himself back up, saw the sun, walked free - that was how he honoured Karl. By treasuring how Karl had been his first in a thousand little ways and remembering that he would pleased, not jealous, to know that there had been a second, a third, a hundred other friends and lovers and inspirations. By ensuring that life went on no matter what it had to fight.

And… he would understand. If he watched over Anders now, he would egg him on like always, dare him to make their big talk a reality. He would see, he would see… if no one else could see why this was how it had to be, that there was no other way forward, Karl would understand. The number of times they had joked about how one day they would do the sort of thing he was planning now, in that not really a joke way, that not even we think this is funny way… If no one else could understand it and stand beside him, of course Karl would - he’d lived it. He’d died because of it.

Action, not emotion. Anders might not feel much right now, he might not have felt much yesterday either apart from resolve, but what did that matter? He would do what no one else could or dared. Others had felt and worried and talked and thought a great deal - fat load of good that had done. If Karl’s death had lingered he stood in it right now and after he left this holy place, there would be no deaths again like it.

He was tired, he was worn out, his shoulders ached and after this last task, one way or another, he was done. This life would be over, either because it was all over or because he would be forced to start a new one. His past had become a little unreadable in parts, but for the first time since forever the future wasn’t entirely clear, either. Anders smiled, lit and warmed by the flames on the altar and perhaps it was a little bitter, but it reached his eyes.


End file.
